Media Arts

Book (in French) published in 2003 at the occasion of the first exhibition staging exclusively biomedia art works at the national art center Le Lieu Unique in Nantes/France. Hauser Jens (ed.): L'Art Biotech. Nantes/Trézélan, 2003.

The publication has not been available anymore since 2008; this PDF is made accessible with the agreement and the kind support of the Filigranes publishing house, until an augmented new edition will be be available. Great thanks to Filigranes and Patrick Le Bescont! https://www.filigranes.com

For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibility of climate change, especially as it relates to the dark bed of the oceans, is unnerving. The oceans are persistently screened: as the human inability to envision large-scale geo-logical politics is laid bare, we are surrounded by ever more innovative machinic eyes. While singular disasters related to climate change produce news events, the ongoing pollution of the oceans does not qualify for live coverage. Is it not surprising that visual culture - from mainstream disaster movies to activist artworks - has taken it upon itself to fill this vacant space of attention. Taking as my case study sculptural installations by Jason deCaires Tylor, which can be viewed underwater or on a screen, in this paper, I theorise a ‘blue’ type of mediation, arguing that durational decay is a trait of oceanic media in the climate change era. This temporal decomposition links blue media to drowned histories that underwrite the Anthropocene, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and the Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic figures as an unmarked grave site. Referring to the work of Zylinska and Kember as well as Väliaho, I argue that as the ocean is increasingly defined by death, the mediation of life becomes necessary in the absence of a live climate change event. Blue media perform their disappearance, thus recalling other disappearances of life in the waters, while they also participate in the neoliberal imperative to capture the productive capacities of life. In their aesthetic decomposition, where disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and decomposition by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety as to the finitude of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own capture within the neoliberal logic of production.

Fostering conservation as a discursive and contextual practice, this essay examines transitional media that necessitate new ways of thinking about continuity. It looks at two examples of artworks with the objective of unraveling the varying modes of their transition. An event score, event-performance, object, and film drawn from the artistic legacies of George Brecht and Nam June Paik illustrate that ideas of permanence and impermanence are linked with an understanding of artworks in time and duration. While conservation reveals itself as an intervention in the temporal dimension of artworks, the theories of duration allow us to better understand the reciprocal relations between materials and meanings. In doing so, these theories acknowledge and attempt to make sense of the performative materiality of these works.

Technology still carries a promise. The spirit that drew media and net artists to the networks, computers, projectors, WWW, databases, sensors, portable devices, and even virtual reality is still alive today as the unique selling point of the new tech: individual, communal and societal change. Much has been done to critique the libertarian, neoliberal and techno-utopian apparatuses within which this spirit is spotted to nest. But there is more to it than hacker ethics, Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism or freedom of trade and liberty of soul from the state and society. The ability to create immaterial change through engaging with matter, and in this case, technological matter, is a foundation of humanism. As continuous human entrapment with technology starts to produce forms of posthumanity, the question of whose matter is being shaped by whom or what, resurfaces with renewed urgency. By the twentieth century engagement with technological matter is set to coincide with the rise of aesthetic modernism and materialism, in which craftsmanship that knows and respects the recalcitrance and agency of matter, enhanced by a few centuries of formalization of knowledge and infrastructures of the spirit and mind, gets to create new spirits and minds. This is done by setting out the new infrastructures, built in matter of plastic and plywood, fabric print and dress design, reading rooms, evening schools and kindergartens, networks, processes and code repositories, in which new ways of working, living, creating, being and becoming could bud, unfold and set, like fruits. Not only a legacy of Soviet avant-garde, but a staple of today's architecture or design is the idea that by creating an environment, one generates its ways of inhabitation, prescribing or pointing towards an ecology, which is always a political action. There is no point designing a system, be it a data system or a house, if it cannot practically and actively affect things outside of its immediate materiality: human bodies, systems of exchange, common taste. Russian Constructivism advanced new materials and designs as always socio-political. Today reflective work on self and others is carried out by the technology of quantified self or open data systems in the optimizing feedback loop. And this is the promise of technology: you farm and form it to generate material spaces that will farm and form you.

This essay discusses two immersive installations by Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg. It argues that both Return to the Present (2011), and Étude taxonomique et comparative entre les castes de la Nouvelle Espagne et celles du Mexique contemporain (2010) provide critical insights into the historical roots of the racial constructs that still prevail in contemporary societies.

Marking the occasion of the first group exhibition of Australian media art at Ars Electronica (as part of its 25th anniversary festival), a specially edited publication was produced, featuring the works of a group of artists whose innovative practices have broadly influenced and defined the culture of media arts in Australia and internationally. Collectively the artists' statements provide a fascinating index of the complex philosophical, cultural, political and technological confluences that mediate our modern society. The 'Unnatural Selection' curatorial essay introduces key theories, themes, projects and artists.

¿CUÁL ES LA RELACIÓN entre la circulación desbordante de imágenes y la imagen que construimos de nuestro cuerpo? ¿En qué medida esta relación informa nuestros modos de acercarnos a la muerte? Estas preguntas son los detonantes de las reflexiones reunidas en este libro que, a través de distintos diálogos con escritores, artistas, cineastas y pensadores como Harun Farocki, Cao Guimaraes, Amanda de la Garza, Narciso Contreras, Irene Azuela, Iván Ruiz, entre otros, se sumerge en los modos en que el consumo audiovisual informa nuestra vida cotidiana. Esta obra se asume como una invitación para que cualquiera participe de estos cuestionamientos y se adentre, sin temor, a los laberintos del paisaje audiovisual contemporáneo.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com.mx/LOS-PODERES-IMAGEN-cultura-audiovisual-ebook/dp/B07L6NGHRX

One of the most salient differences between fine art and new media art lies in the possibility for interactivity. Interactivity is not simply an inherent quality of new media, it also relates to a crucial ethico-aesthetic premise informing deconstructive art from Dada and Surrealism through radical art of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present. The ethico-aesthetic premise in question concerns breaking down the barrier between the viewer and the work of art and bringing art into life. More specifically the goal is to bring creativity into everyday life as an antidote to alienation and reification. Whereas new media art finds it relatively easy to devise art games that encourage creative involvement on the part of the viewer, fine art is severely hindered in its attempts in this direction by the traditional focus on the artist-genius and the transformation of the artistic product (whatever its material) into a precious object. It will be shown that creative games exist in fine art but they are for the most part designed by the artist for the artist. This is even the case with the most radical fine artists celebrated at the turn of the millennium such as Rirkrit Tiravanija who Nicolas Bourriaud put forward as a prime instance of so-called relational aesthetics.

This chapter illustrates the reaction to the preservation and conservation of software-based media art and summarizes the crucial ideas and questions that involve this emergent area of conservation. The chapter analyzes the role in which conservators explore the impact of the method, attitudes to change, technology obsolescence, and the influence of the how the artist imagines and understands their practice on the conservation of these works as they enter the exhibition space. In addressing the conservation of software-based media art, this chapter highlights the variety of knowledge and expertise required: expertise that is personified in the teamwork of those who support these functions. The author completes the chapter by recommending that developing and maintaining these efforts has become a crucial part of the software-based media conservator's role.

Critical new media art is based on research-based art practice. It is both research-and process-oriented, so that the final result is not " completed " works (products) but rather process artifacts. This paper describes the artistic research and development of the art-group " Artistic Bokeh " , which is developing new documentation formats, and conducting experiments about the value of artistic practice and labor.

The artistic use of error has a long history, and this essay attempts to reconstruct the genealogy of the relationship between artists and error. It then goes on to analyze the characteristics of technological error used in art along with the reasons for its appreciation by media artists and media activists. Finally, it contextualizes the practices of media art and media activism taken as exemplars in questions bound to contemporary technological power. The aim of this theoretical trajectory is to understand how error is used, for what purposes, and with what outcomes. Further, its goal is to determine whether and how the current popularity of technological error is bound to a certain relationship with technological power, the characteristics of which are control, regulation, prevention, and normalization.

""Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture explores a variety of new theory and technologies, including devices and techniques for motion capture for music and performance, advanced photographic techniques, computer generated images derived from different sources, game engine software, airflow to capture the motions of bird flight and low-altitude imagery from airborne devices.

The international authors of this book are practising experts from universities, art practices and organisations, research centres and independent research. They describe electronic visualisation used for such diverse aspects of culture as airborne imagery, computer generated art based on the autoimmune system, motion capture for music and for sign language, the visualisation of time and the long term preservation of these materials. Selected from the EVA London conferences from 2009-2012, held in association with the Computer Arts Society of the British Computer Society, the authors have reviewed, extended and fully updated their work for this state-of-the-art volume.
""

Revealing a substantial amount of evidence hitherto missed by pertinent literature reviews, this article sets out to offer a critical appraisal of the empirical research literature on the contributions arts-based programmes may make to the process of desistance from crime. The article begins by focusing on evaluations of arts-based programmes run by practitioners inside prisons, and their effects in terms of three sets of developments that are thought to advance desistance: psychological and attitudinal changes; increased learning capacity and motivations; and social skills building. Our appraisal then proceeds to address the effects of arts-based prison programmes after participants’ release into the community; a theme that has received very limited research attention to date, and even less attention in extant literature reviews. In the next section of the article, we briefly discuss our own evaluation of an arts-based programme that is aimed at prolonging and enhancing desistance through providing former prisoners with opportunities to continue engaging with the arts after release. We conclude with a few short remarks as to the lessons that can be drawn from this article for the design of arts-based programmes in the field of criminal justice.

This paper presents The Quiet Walk, an interactive mobile artwork for sonic explorations of urban space. The goal of TQW is to find the “quietest place”. An interface on the mobile device directs the user to avoid noisy areas of the city, giving directions to find quiet zones. Data collected by the system generates a geo-acoustic map of the city that facilitates the personal recollection of sonic memories. The system is comprised of 3 components: a smartphone running a custom application based on libpd and openFrameworks, a web server collecting the GPS and acoustical data, and computer in an exhibition space displaying a visualisation of the sound map. This open- ended platform opens up possibilities of mobile digital signal processing, not only for sound art related artworks but also as a platform for data-soundscape compositions and mobile, digital explorations in acoustic ecology studies.

Multimédia můžeme v historii umění chápat buď jako rekurzivní koncept nebo souvislou linii vývoje složených forem, která se v určitých historických obdobích střídavě vynořuje a zase mizí z dominantního diskurzu. Vzorovým příkladem multimédia je např. koncept antického dramatu. Tento koncept se vynoří v pozdní renesanci, aby pomohl vzniknout barokní opeře, a o dvě stě padesát let později se objevuje v argumentaci Richarda Wagnera, kterým jím zdůvodňuje ideu Gesamtkunstwerku (souborného, resp. totálního uměleckého díla). O dalších zhruba sto padesát let později dochází ke vzkříšení myšlenky multimédií v oblasti nových (digitálních) médií a autoři vlivné publikace o této problematice odvíjí historii multimédií právě od R. Wagnera.  V souvislosti s ideou multimédií v umění se objevuje celá skupina otázek, na které bychom se měli pokusit nalézt odpovědi. Například jak složená forma zpětně působí na své jednotlivé konstitutivní složky? Dochází skrze celek k zesílení nebo oslabení účinku jednotlivých složek?

While existing analytical frameworks (Chion 1994, Coulter 2009) provide basic classification tools for experimental audiovisual works, they fall short in elaborating the variety of compositional possibilities falling within the notion of “synchresis” (Chion 1994). I propose to delineate the various shades of synchresis through a case study analysis of the somewhat simpler relations between light and sound in media installation works using luminosonic objects: objects which appear to emit both sound and light in an integrated manner.
I will suggest a graphical framework for the analysis and composition of audiovisual relations between sound media and self-illuminating light objects, detailing various forms of integrated audiovisual dynamics. The framework will relate the compositional concepts of vertical harmonicity and horizontal counterpoint (Chion 1994) to the perceptual notion of “cross- modal binding” (Whitelaw 2008), thus linking compositional dynamics to perceptual effects and affects.

Perhaps it’s obvious; if we take radio out of radio art then we usually have a sound based art work that is not broadcasted, unicasted and/or multicasted; conversely if we take the ‘art’ out of radio art then we have radio (in all of its conventional formats) ... but do we have radio art if we simply combine radio and art?

This paper explores the idea of radio art as a media based acoustic art form and argues that the Australian works Journal (1969) by David Ahern and Quadrophonic Cocktail (1986) by Chris Mann are forms of acoustic media art.

Further to this, it asks is there a role for radio art in education?

From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.

Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.

Abstract: In this Global Research Report, we focus on Global Dolphin Defense. Our research is original, especially because it includes data from qualitative interviews with those on the front-lines of this issue conducted by the author, Aleta Neilson, as well as other interviews and even ongoing interactive project creations. Besides speaking to first hand to witnesses, Ms. Neilson reviews existing data, literature, and evidence on the sentience, intelligence, and behavior of dolphins from scientific experts as well as presenting and addressing some of the common arguments of dolphin-killers, as they hunt and slaughter cetaceans, such as wild dolphins. We explore the physiological, and psycho-social implications for these hunted cetaceans and their populations. The dolphin defense topic addresses an international and intercultural issue of global significance. We ask; Dolphins are highly intelligent and self-aware; should they be protected from hunters through international agreements and laws for cetacean rights? We go beyond this, by creating awareness for giving readers and viewers some easy ways to take instant actions to be a part of standing up for international laws and treaties advocating for humane treatment for dolphins and other cetaceans, should they so choose. With this global learning engagement capstone project, we intend to inspire and provide an experience geared toward creating awareness for exploring and solving problems of practical importance to the field.

Additional Note: Ms. A. A. Neilson's mentor for this FIU research is the brilliant FIU: Professor Katherine Lineberger PhD.

Keywords: dolphin, non-human persons, global dolphin-defense, dolphin-hunters, poachers, cetaceans, cetacean rights, animal rights, animal welfare, whale, activism, advocacy, FIU global learning, FIU peace corps prep, dolphin defense report, global engagement project (PDF) GLOBAL DOLPHIN DEFENSE REPORT. Also available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333879549_GLOBAL_DOLPHIN_DEFENSE_Global_Dolphin_Defense

El Manual para Emprendedores Culturales presenta de manera sencilla algunos principios básicos de gestión estratégica requeridos para manejar con éxito proyectos pertenecientes a las industrias creativas. Esta publicación fue creada en el marco del proyecto ¨Crea y Emprende¨ del Ministerio de la Producción del Perú en alianza con el Ministerio de Cultura. Presenta cerca de veinte proyectos culturales y está dirigido a artistas, emprendedores culturales, consultores, educadores e investigadores que deseen empezar su propio proyecto o aprender sobre estrategias de desarrollo de audiencias, marketing, comunicaciones, producción, presupuesto y recursos de financiamiento para proyectos artísticos y culturales.

This practical handbook aims to present in a very easy way the basic  principles of strategic management needed to run a successful project in the creative industries. This publication was created within the project "Crea y Emprende" of the Ministry of Production of Peru in alliance with the Ministry of Culture of this country. It presents the experiences of nearly twenty cultural projects and it is addressed to artists, cultural entrepreneurs, consultants, educators and researchers willing to start their own project or getting to learn about audience development strategies, marketing, communications, production, budgeting and funding resources for arts projects.

The Auditory Setting introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and production. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene.

Art deployed using the augmented reality medium is doing so from a micropolitics that distances itself from the uses of these same technologies elsewhere, such as in gaming, advertising, or entertainment paradigms. However, the current terms used to describe this type of artwork do not adequately engage the relational and material specificities of the AR medium as it collides with an emergent thread of interventionist, activist and/or narrative art practice. To describe this emergent hybrid situational artwork, this paper proposes the term software assemblage. The augmented reality artworks I will describe as software assemblages, mobilise experimental processes to examine the relational intensities emerging between the AR medium, the ubiquitous devices with which we have become intimate, and our human social assemblages, specifically in this early 21st century capitalist milieu.

"When we consider what constitutes the essence of poetry, we are confronted with a variety of questions none of which may be answered with final satisfaction. One feature that seems to emerge repeatedly through time is the notion of imagination and the term ‘poetic imagination’ to depict the emotional, imaginative, intellectual and the expressive language used to reflect the writer’s consciousness. This paper primarily discusses the core finding of my research in the concepts, theories and ideas of poetic imagination. The research characterizes a series of modes of imagination in contemporary poetry. These modes have been drawn from the existing notions and concepts of poetic imagination. The research identifies that imagination in contemporary poetry moves more towards imaging rather than poetic imagination. In other words, imagination shows greater affinity to imaging in contemporary poetry. This paper aims to present the significant contribution of the overall research which is the conceptualization of a paradigm of various modes of imagination in contemporary poetry, with imaging and poetic imagination as its two ends. Other modes of creative imagination reside between imaging and poetic imagination.

[Keywords: contemporary notions of poetic imagination, modes of imagination, imaging, creative imagination, poetry, theories of imagination]"

A budding of research and experimentation in the field of contemporary art is currently encountered in many of the countries of Southeast Asia. This is all the more noticeable in those countries that are seeing economic and cultural growth ineluctably leading them to meet and interact with forms of communication and stylistic elements of expression belonging to a globalized universe.

In Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, highly ancient artistic traditions are meeting new forms of expression.

In looking at the influences that nourish Southeast Asian art, we should note the primal role of a religious and philosophical legacy. The efforts of many experimental visual artists aim, indeed, at developing a conceptual language that revitalises traditional cultural resources in a new context. This motivates the rediscovering of concepts belonging to the Buddhist philosophy and the employing of traditional aesthetics patterns to represent the individual and social identities of contemporary man.

These artists are making their own statement with regard to the problems arising from geopolitical changes and places, traditions, and memories that have disappeared or have been transformed by rapid growth.

This paper focuses mainly on the transformation of body representation and perception in the new media arts of continental Southeast Asia, in a transcultural perspective.

From the very beginning of Southeast Asian civilization, the body has played a central role, as a coherent and living expression of codified aesthetic, artistic and philosophic values. Use of the body - in visual and performing arts - and the dynamics of gesture are the emblem or symbol of the transformation of socially shared meanings.

Digital, video and performing art - due to their specific ephemeral and transitory status - can be considered as some of the best media for representing this “changing body”, faithfully reflecting the dynamics of contemporary Southeast Asian metropolitan culture.

In such a context, media arts are especially interesting because they are still young - due to their history of only a few decades - and at the experimental stage, polarized by a strong and well-defined poetic and figurative universe linked both to ancestral indigenous heritage and to the pursuit of a universal language.

Considering some of the most important contexts of the new media arts in continental Southeast Asia, the paper will offer an original view of the transformation of that visual culture, paying special attention to contemporary Thai reality, which can in fact be considered as one of the most representative centres of new media arts and artistic avant-garde in the whole region.

A study thus directed opens an extremely wide field of investigation, involving the desire for communication between international and distant visual realities, while, at the same time, providing a glance at realities that, though still very fresh from an artistic point of view, are steadily becoming established on the artistic scenario worldwide.

Very tall narrow digital pictures inspired by the art and craft of both modern and traditional totem poles. The pictures cannot be viewed all at one time, but are interactive and must be scrolled. The patterns on these poles were derived from natural and man made patterns. With each totem pole you must scroll down its page. You will only be able to see a portion at one time.

This paper discusses three methodological themes employed by contemporary media artists who reuse obsolete information technology hardware in their work. Methodologies include the exploration of the hidden “blackboxed” layer of technology by circuit bending artists like Reed Ghazala, the tactical use of technologies to bring social change by artists like Natalie Jeremijenko, and the archaeological use of outdated technologies to intervene in history by artists like Tom Jennings. These themes are presented as useful tools to construct a language of reuse which serves a valuable function in a culture increasingly confronted by electronic waste and assists in critiquing assumptions of obsolescence, technological progress and understanding digital culture primarily within the framework of “new media.”

Resumen
Este artículo esboza los componentes centrales de una crítica práctica de la
comunicación, entendida ésta como un camino metodológico para abordar
el estudio de los medios de comunicación y su apropiación crítica. Parte
de la discusión del concepto de comunicación desde la óptica de Vilém
Flusser para después ponerlo en diálogo con una teoría de la comunicación
basada en el estudio de la memoria. La crítica práctica de la comunicación
se desenvuelve, por lo tanto, sobre el territorio del archivo y se fundamenta
en una arqueología de los medios y un arte mediático para su
operación. Finalmente, a partir de delinear la crítica práctica de la comunicación,
este texto defiende el lugar del artista y del arqueólogo en medios
como una pieza clave dentro de las facultades de la comunicación.
Palabras clave: crítica práctica de la comunicación, comunicación,
memoria, arqueología de los medios, arte mediático, máquinas de guerra.
Abstract
This article outlines the key components of a practical critique of
communication, understood as a methodological path to address the
study of media and its critical appropriation. It starts with the discussion
of the concept of communication from the lens of Vilém Flusser in order
to articulate a theory of communication based on the study of memory.
Consequently, the practical critique of communication unravels along
the territory of the archive and it is based on media archaeology and
media art for its operation. Finally, by delineating the practical critique
of communication, this text defends the place of the media artist and the
media archaeologist as a key figure within the schools of communication
and media.